Novel
Fahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury · 1953
Synopsis
In an unnamed American city, firemen no longer fight fires: they burn books, which the law forbids. Guy Montag, one of them, comes home each evening to Mildred, who spends her days in front of three walls of screens, radio seashells in her ears. Clarisse, a seventeen-year-old neighbour, asks him if he is happy. An old woman refuses to leave her house and burns with her books. Montag hides at home books taken from the flames; his captain, Beatty, knows everything about books and despises them.
Context
The first version, a short story entitled The Fireman, was written in nine days on a machine rented at ten cents per half hour, in the basement of the Powell Library of the University of California, Los Angeles: 9.80 dollars in all. It appeared in Galaxy in 1951; the novel came out from Ballantine in 1953, then as a serial in Playboy in 1954. From 1967, Ballantine sold schools an expurgated version with some seventy-five passages altered; Bradbury learned of it in 1979 from readers and obtained the return of the complete text.
Who it is for
A short science-fiction novel, with an imagistic and rapid sentence style. Translated by Henri Robillot in 1955, then revised by Jacques Chambon in 1995.
Prizes and reception
More than ten million copies sold; Retro-Hugo for best novel for 1954, awarded in 2004; adapted by François Truffaut in 1966.
Sources for this page 12
The pages consulted to check this page.